“Well, I’ve heard quite a lot about Billy-O,” Larissa said. “I don’t know Billy-O.”
“Right. Well. He needs someone to build a bigger stable and paddock with him. He asked me to help.”
“Help what?”
“Build the stable. He and this other guy go on the brumbie runs, but he needs stable help, and then help selling the horses. He needs a second-hand man for that stuff.”
“He has money to pay you?”
“Yup.” Kai grinned and drank. “He got a small business loan.”
Her smile faded. If they had been in the country legally, if they had been Australians, perhaps they could’ve also gotten a loan, bought a second troopie. That was one of the problems with the work she and Kai could get. It was always off the books, and the opportunities were both competitive and limited. She forced herself to smile through her stab of jealousy.
“What do you think?” Kai sounded elated. He held her hand while they ate.
“Where is this Mungo?”
“Well, actually, the stable’s on the edge of Mungo National Park, outside a little river port town called Pooncarie.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Yeah, tiny.”
“How close to here?”
“Not that close. But you know what?” He pulled out a wad of cash out of his pocket. “He gave me money upfront—”
“You already accepted?” she said, frowning.
“Larissa, what was I going to do?”
She tried to unstress herself by taking another gulp of wine. Then another. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “Perhaps talk to me first.”
“I wasn’t near a phone, and I didn’t have any other offers. We had to eat tonight. And we need a plan, Larissa. For the future. Don’t you feel like we’re slowly running out of options?”
She didn’t want to nod in assent. “Maybe we should go,” she suggested carefully.
“To Pooncarie?”
“No…just…go.” She raised her eyes to him. “You and me. Away from here. I think you’re right. Perhaps our time here is drawing to an end.” She didn’t want to tell him about how sad that made her, or about her appalling conversation with Mejida; she wanted to concentrate on the great unknown. “Kai, we’ve never seen Perth. Cairns. Ayers Rock, Adelaide. A baby dingo. Let’s blow this shanty life, and travel on down the road.”
“Larissa…” Now it was Kai’s turn to frown. “Are you already disillusioned in the hopes and dreams you held just yesterday?”
“Of course not,” she quickly said, feeling the crestfallen mountains oppressively black and close.
“You want to be traveling on? Resume searching for the thing that’s perpetually out of reach?”
She reached for him, stammering through her stunted replies. What do you mean, she thought she said. It’s not out of reach. You’re right here.
“You may be right,” Kai said. “Perhaps it is time. But two things…I love our summers here. Lazy, relaxed, quiet…dried-out orange groves, dips in the lake, kangaroos everywhere. I’m not tired of anything yet. I like having my own thing. I like what we do. I want this to work.”
“I know. But it’s not working.”
“And second,” Kai continued, “we don’t have any money. Did you forget that part? Where can we go? Into the Red Center? You want to go up to Cairns? To Darwin? Maybe I could be a busker on the streets of Perth out west, I can play my uke and the Aborigines can put quarters into my Akubra?”
“I can wait tables,” she tried. “If we didn’t live so far from town, I could do it here. Maybe we should move from Rainbow Drive then.” She feared that part was inevitable; something felt ended, wasted.
“Look at our little bungalow.” He said that so sadly. “The stuff that dreams are made on…Look at our view.”
“The shades are always drawn, Kai,” said Larissa. “I’d rather save what we can than have the entire dream vanish into thin air.”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to do, Larissa,” Kai said, “with this stable thing.”
She had lost her appetite and sat at the table looking at him in the dim light from the table lamp and the flickering candles.
“Where did you say Pooncarie is?” she asked with a resigned sigh.
“Well, here’s the thing…” He cleared his throat. She listened intently. Why was there always a thing? “It’s a little way away.”
“How little?”
“I dunno. I’m not too sure.”
“How long did it take Billy-O to get here?”
“He wasn’t sure.”
“Kai! You’re being evasive. Is it forty miles? A hundred miles? What?”
“No, I think…”
“It’s more than a hundred miles?”
“You know, I’m not sure.”
Taking matters into her own hands, Larissa went to get the local map out of the kitchen drawer. Pooncarie wasn’t on the local map. Taking out a map of Australia, she spread it on the floor, searched for Pooncarie, couldn’t find it, searched for Mungo National Park, found that, looked up the legend, measured the distance in the inches on the floor. Finally she looked up. “Kai,” she said in a stunned, empty voice, “it’s over twelve hundred kilometers away!”
“No. That much?”
“Yes! That’s over seven hundred miles.”
“Huh.” He kind of slumped at the table, chewing his lip and rubbing the wine glass.
“Kai, did you really tell Billy you were going to do it?”
“Well, look, I knew it wasn’t close, like commuting distance. I know…”
“So what are you proposing?”
“I’m proposing,” he said, smiling anew, trying to sell it to her like a good smooth-talking salesman, like the young guy in a white shirt and black jacket and ironed jeans, selling her a Jag with quad tailpipes to drive from the gas station to the supermarket, to drive from the cleaners to the elementary school to pick up her smallest son, who fit so nicely inside her tiny two-seater, “I’m proposing that I go live with Billy for a couple of months, through this winter, work with him, help him build the stable, help him sell the horses, make some dough, and then come back in the summer with money and resume our tour.”
“What about me?”
Kai cleared his throat almost without pause. “Here’s the thing. Billy-O said his place is too small for the two of us. I can crash on his couch, but we both can’t. We can’t put him out of his own bed, can we?”
“So you propose I stay here and pay rent on this place?” Stay here, next to Mejida, without a car, without a job and without Kai? Larissa looked up at him from the floor, her eyes shocked and wide.
“No. We can’t pay rent here and try to save money for the summer. We’ve got to be smart about this.”
“Smart, yes.”
“So here’s what I was thinking.” There was a small pause there—for thought, for a breath, for tactics? “What about you going to visit your friend Che?”
“Che?” Larissa said dully, something inside her melting into numbness.
“Not a bad idea, right?”
“You know Che lives in Manila, right?”
“I know. Remember how often you told me how much you wanted to go? Back in Jersey you kept talking and talking about it. This is a great time to do it.”
“I’d have to get to Sydney, and then fly to Manila.”
“I know. There’s a bus twice a day that goes to Sydney.”
“But, Kai, we don’t have money for rent or food! Where are we going to get a thousand bucks for a flight to Manila? Plus I’ll need money when I’m there. I can’t just show up and expect Che to feed me.”
“Why not? All that money you had been sending her, you don’t think it’s worth a little reciprocation? A little quid pro quo?”
“She was broke last time I spoke to her. She doesn’t bail me out. I bail her out.”
Kai said nothing.
“Also, I haven’t heard from her or been in contact with her since I
left. What if she’s not there anymore?”
“She’s lived in the same place for years. Why would she not be there?”
“I don’t know. But I’m not in Summit anymore, am I? She was having so much trouble when she last wrote…” Larissa could not remember what that trouble was. Something about her boyfriend…?
“I could get a job, too,” she offered, a little shrilly. “In Pooncarie. At a local bar.”
“We got nowhere to live,” Kai repeated impatiently, “except with Billy, and he doesn’t have room.”
“So we’ll rent a room.”
“And pay rent again. Pooncarie is a small town, perhaps only a one-bar town. What if you come and there’s no work? What are we going to do then? We won’t be able to save a penny.”
She waited. “Why don’t we cross that bridge when we get to it? I’ll find work. Why can’t I help you and Billy-O at the stables?”
“Help us do what? Build a barn? Tame horses?”
“Either. Both.”
“Larissa, be serious. We have nowhere to live!”
“So that’s your grand plan? To ship me off to Manila and move to Pooncarie?”
“Not ship you off. Let you go do the thing you’ve always wanted to do. And not move but migrate. Go where the work is.”
“What about this house?”
“I’m too sad to speak about it,” Kai said, not looking at her, “but we will have to let this one go. Nothing we can do. We can’t pay for it. Next summer we’ll find ourselves a new place. Closer to town, though, so we won’t have this problem again.”
“What about our Land Cruiser? What about your bike?” She was still on her haunches, on the floor, her hands on her lap, looking up at him in the chair. She was trying to find her way clear but coming into dark alleys. They spent over sixty thousand dollars on that eleven-seat safari vehicle five years ago. What was it worth now?
“The bike stays with me,” he said. “But we’ll pawn the cruiser.”
“We’re going to pawn the cruiser?” she said incredulously.
“Just for three months. That way we’ll have plenty of money to get you to Manila, and I’ll earn enough to get it out of hock come October. What? Don’t look so glum. It’s just temporary.”
“Everything’s temporary,” whispered Larissa.
“No, not everything.”
And later, in their bed, Kai said to her, “I have to solve this, can’t you see? Right now there’s no work for me here. We’re hurting. And it’s hurting us.”
He was right. They were hurting. The open catgut feeling inside her now lasted twisted protracted periods throughout the day, constantly making her feel like she was falling, even while walking, especially while walking, always with the breathless sensation of the never-ending plunge.
“We need to get through the lean months.” Kai was soothing her with his voice, his long and gentle caressing fingers. “We’ll make it. We’re strong; this is what strong people do—what they have to. We’re regrouping, that’s all.” Leaning over her, he kissed her easily. “Remember when we wondered: what are we going to do when the money runs out? Well, now we know.”
“I don’t think we said money,” she whispered into his Adam’s apple, into his careless breath. “I think we said luck.”
“I’m hoping,” he said, “we still got us some of that, babydoll.”
Larissa thought she was all closed up, shut in, boarded up, condemned, a Chico girl without a ride, but Kai made love to her that night as if she were the hospitality committee at the welcome inn. Everyone was invited, the doors were flung open, and the rooms were free.
2
A Motherless Child
And just like that, days later, she was on the bus alone to Sydney and then on the plane to Manila.
Don’t worry, Larissa, an unwashed and unkempt Billy-O assured her, I’ll take good care of Kai for you. Right. Because that made her feel relaxed inside. She brought with her a suitcase; she brought with her everything she owned—which wasn’t much and fit in a suitcase. It was remarkable how little she had accumulated in the bungalow they’d fled.
They never paid Mejida. When Larissa had confronted Bianca before she left, asking why in the world she would talk to Mejida about her past, about her life, Bianca looked horrified and bewildered.
“I never talked to her about you, Larissa,” she said. “Not a word.” She paused. “But Mejida’s husband, Umar, did tell Bart that a little while ago someone had been snooping around looking for you, asking all kinds of questions. A big guy with a gut. An American.” The blood turned to ice in Larissa’s veins. That was part of the reason why she let it all go so quickly, why she barely protested Kai’s tangle with Billy-O. They owed over a thousand dollars to a woman who knew something about Larissa. Some American man came snooping.
Even in this seemingly simple life, something was happening she couldn’t control. Something was amiss in the blue universe, in the frosty glades.
In Manila it was hot and sticky. To explain this was impossible. How could a country just a few hundred miles north of where she lived have a completely different climate? It’s not in the same hemisphere, the Manila cab driver who picked her up said to her. There it’s winter. Here it’s summer. “But why would you come here in July, miss? It’s the absolute worst month to come.”
“Really?” She settled in the back of his old beat-up cab. “You think something could be worse than July being winter?” She glanced outside at the morning rush hour crowds in the damp heat. “Looks okay to me.”
“Does it? It’s monsoon season. A typhoon a day. And in Paranaque, where you’re headed, everything floods. It’s a swamp down there. Good luck to you.”
She stared outside at the mess of traffic, the palm trees, the loopy jaywalking mothers with strollers, the racing bike messengers, the jitneys. “When do the rains go?”
“Late October.”
Great. She’d be gone by then. Her return date was October 20.
They only had a few miles to travel from the airport to Che’s address, but it took them over an hour; the highway wasn’t moving.
“Must be flooding somewhere in Las Pinas,” the cabbie said. “It always happens. This whole southern strip from Manila to San Pedro is two inches above sea level. One high tide and we flood. Bays on both sides. It just pours in. Roads are made impassable by waters.”
“Hmm,” said Larissa, her face pressed to the dirty window. “Must be good for the crops.” In Jindabyne the orange groves dried out in the summer heat.
“Maybe good for crops,” said the cabbie. “Not so good for people.” Whistling, he smiled at her in the rear-view mirror. “But we don’t mind. We take it all as it comes. It’s all good, miss. Bahala na. It’s all how it should be.”
Is it? Was it? When the driver finally got off the parking lot that was the highway, and Larissa started looking at the signs, she became perplexed by the street names. Turkey. Texas. Libya. Syria. Hawaii. That one pinched her heart. And then after the crop fields and the public park, Benevolence. Kindness. Goodness. The poorer the neighborhood, the more virtuous the street names. Gentleness and Humility were framed by Meekness Extension.
Che lived in a gaggle of shacks spliced together between San Pablo and Humility. Larissa asked the driver to wait, but he got another fare and wouldn’t. She was left standing with her bags in the middle of a shanty town. She wasn’t used to the humidity, her clothes stuck oppressively to her body, her lashes stuck together every time she blinked, her mascara ran and she wasn’t even crying, but it did feel like the next time she blinked, she might not be able to open her eyes again. Pulling her suitcase, she struggled down the dirt road. Was there even a chance Che’s place would be air conditioned? Maybe they could scrape up some cash and buy a used AC unit, because Larissa could not live like this for three months. Could not. Che described her house as number 37 from the top of San Pablo, or number 12 from the bottom of Humility. But you really have to count carefully, Larissa, Che had writ
ten jokingly. They’re not marked and it’s easy to mistake two little houses for one spacious abode.
Larissa counted. Just to make sure, she traipsed back to San Pablo and counted again. Did Che really live in a tiny shack made of straw and bamboo, patched together with scraps of plywood and stitched-together cardboard, a handmade doll’s house with no windows, just openings for air that flashed open on someone else’s city? There was no one to ask, and Larissa stood in the middle of the road with her suitcase, her purse, her black carry-on, the same one in which she had carried away her other life, too, carried away her other self. When she knocked on the counterfeit door it nearly came off its one hinge. It was morning. Was it ten? Perhaps Che was sleeping. Or at work. Did she really live here?
A small man came out, still in his pajamas, barely awake. Smiling he asked her, a stranger, if she wanted to come in. No, thank you, Larissa said. I’m looking for my friend, Che—Claire Cherenge. Is she here?
“I’m very sorry, miss. No one by that name lives here,” the man replied.
“You sure?”
“Am I sure? Look at the size of my house. You think I wouldn’t know if a woman named Che lived here?”
“How long have you been here?”
“There years. And before me and my family, an old woman lived here alone but she died. That’s how we got the house. But no one young like you describe. Maybe you have the wrong address.” They both looked at the scribblings in her tiny handwritten address book. But no. This was it. This was house number 12 from the bottom of Humility.
“She doesn’t live here, I’m sorry. You sure you don’t want to come in?” the man said regretfully, before closing his paper door.
Larissa stood dumbly in the middle of the street. What in the world was she going to do now? Behind the row of huts were wet fields, and down the street on Goodness, a morning market. Was this where Che had sold fruit for Father Emilio? The ground was sopping; all the dust was mud, but mud with a rising vapor because it was hot and getting hotter. Kai had given her two hundred dollars from pawning the cruiser, and she’d already spent twenty of it; was a hundred and eighty bucks enough to live on for three months, even in Paranaque? Where was Che? Not here for at least three years. Larissa glanced at the house before she walked away. How could her friend have lived here? She never described it like this in her letters. She talked about Lorenzo, their cute simple life, the church, the priest, wanting a baby, selling fruit, demonstrating for hire. She never wrote to Larisa about this. Once, a long time ago, when they were adolescent small-town girls on swings in shorts and ponytails, didn’t they have the same dreams?